Re: Q. about usage of notes

On 8/31/2010 11:07 AM, Johan Herland wrote:

On Tuesday 31 August 2010, Stefan Naewe wrote:

quoted

Hi,

I was playing around with 'git notes' these days (after reading S.Chacons
post to this list and hist blog post at progit.org).

Some things came to my mind when doing some 'git notes add' and
'git notes remove':

How do I really get rid of git notes ? 'git notes remove' doesn't really
remove the notes but creates a new commit (like 'git rm file ; git
commit..' does).

Well, how do you "really" get rid of a file on a "regular" Git branch? The 
answer is that Git doesn't let you do this without rewriting history (e.g. 
using 'git filter-branch' to create a new history where that file never 
existed). The same argument goes for notes: If you want to remove all traces 
of notes for a given object, you must rewrite the notes history so that 
those notes never existed.

OK. Understood.
 

At least that's how the 'git notes' porcelain behaves. At the plumbing 
level, it's possible to create notes commits that don't point to the 
preceding notes history (every notes commit is a root commit), and thus end 
up with "history-less" notes. An example of this is the notes-cache code.

quoted

And why does 'git remove' do that repetetively (is that even a word...?),
i.e. 'git add -m"Note" ; git remove; git remove; git remove; git remove'
creates 5 commit objects under 'refs/notes/commits' Is that the intended
behaviour ?

(I assume your meant to put "notes" in all those commands: git notes add, 
git notes remove, etc.)

Yes, sorry.

Yes, this is the intended behaviour. Otherwise you would need a separate 
notes index where you could stage notes changes (with git notes add/remove), 
and then later commit those notes changes with (the imaginary) git notes 
commit. This was deemed too cumbersome/complicated, and we settled for the 
current approach instead.

But if I do:

$ touch file ; git add file ; git commit -m"add file"

and then 

$ for n in 1 2 3; do git rm file; git commit -m"rm file"; done
 
I get:

rm 'file'
[master 5b24511] rm file
 0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 file
fatal: pathspec 'file' did not match any files
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
fatal: pathspec 'file' did not match any files
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

I don't get 4 commits. That's the part I don't understand :-(

If you want to make several adds/removes per notes commit, you could:

1. Use git-fast-import and its 'N' command (search the manual page for 
"notemodify").

OK. Thanks. Didn't know that. 

2. Check out the notes ref into your working tree ("git checkout 
refs/notes/commits"). You can now edit notes directly, like you would edit 
your "regular" files. (Ideally, you should have some knowledge about the 
format of notes trees before you add/rename files). When you're done, you 
stage and commit as you would do in your regular checkout.

OK. I already tried that.
 
And to delete the 'notes branch' I can only use 'git update-ref' ?!


Thanks for your answer

Stefan
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